Introducing magic to the familiar

VISUAL ARTS: Fractals CIT Crawford College degree show.CIT Crawford College of Art and Design, Sharman Crawford St. Mon-Sat 10am-4.30pm. Until June 26 Fine Art MA MA show by Liz Cullinane, Mags Geaney and Rosanne Lynch.CIT Crawford College of Art Design Gallery, Wandesford Quay Daily 10am-6pm June 19-26, Until July 1

There are 50 exhibitors this year in the Crawford College degree show, and another three presenting for an MA. The latter occupy the Crawford’s new exhibition space on Wandesford Quay. It’s a great space. In fact it is the former Fenton Gallery, and good as it is to see CIT stepping in and committing to an exhibitions programme in a central venue, it has to be said that Cork still feels the departure of both the Fenton and the Vangard, its two main contemporary commercial galleries.

Fifty graduates is a lot. Can quality be sustained over such a number in what is a modestly sized institution? The show is good, the general standard is pretty high, though work that feels as if it’s really arrived, truly convincing work, is rare – but then, it always is. Casting a cold eye, some graduates certainly do impress, and one of them is Aine Maher. She makes free-standing and wall-mounted sculptures that are architectonic and atmospheric, incorporating photographic, textural, found and constructed elements. If the phrase “the poetics of space” didn’t exist, one would have to invent it to describe her work, which is exceptionally well-judged, subtle and persuasive. She mentions a bid to capture “moments on the edge of intimacy”, and that’s apposite too.

One of relatively few graduates to offer anything like a vision of Ireland at the moment, in a way that reaches beyond a purely documentary or critical analysis of some aspect of what happened, is James Greenway. His installation uses video and film. His video pitches us right onto a fairground ride, a big wheel. Move beyond that and you’re in a room in which two looped pieces of Super-8 film are projected onto walls at 90 degrees to each other. Each is fixed on just one scene: gorse fires burning fiercely on distant hillsides at (I think) Lough Ine in one and, in the other, shot from the summit of Skellig Michael, gulls wheel in the blackness of the yawning chasm between the rocky peaks.

Video is frictionless and modern, while film looks, sounds and feels like something much older. But it has a fabulous visual, physical quality to it that video lacks. The clickety-clack of the projectors and the flickering intensity of the light and dark tones of the images seem so much more definite and real than smooth, depthless video. Film retains an authority. Greenway doesn’t indulge in any trickery, he keeps his camera fixed on the subject, inviting us to absorb its significance. We take in the raging fires and the abandoned island outpost.

One of Greenway's acknowledged influences is Werner Herzog's film Heart of Glass, about the disintegration of a community when the secret of the ruby glass, on which its prosperity is based, dies with the master-glassblower. The conclusion was filmed on the Skelligs.

Looking at Greenway’s images, there is a similar strong sense of desolation, the feeling that we are looking not only at the aftermath of a disaster, but at a greater, moral emptiness and loss.

There’s much more that merits attention including, to take a cross-section, Amy Reidy’s exuberant use of packaging materials, effected with great verve and wit; Colette Cronin’s skeptical look at the idea of house and home; Pam Carroll’s meticulous use of materials, forms and images in sculptures that explore the idea of conscience; Lorraine Shanahan’s tableaux featuring skeletons; Aodhgan O’Flaherty’s evocation of technological foreboding; Kate O’Brien’s ingeniously kinetic portrait projection; Kevin Mullaney’s engaging DIY participation in several iconic works of Western culture, including a Vermeer painting and a Bach aria; and Sarah Moore’s equation of magnetic tape with speech.

Of the painters, Fionnuala Kelly, Claire Hurley, Nora Buttimer, Sarah Patricia Gleeson and Laura Healy all score highly.

Of the MAs, Mags Geaney’s incantatory revival of her mother’s discarded clothes is moving and disturbing in equal measure and Roseanna Lynch’s meticulous examination of light in photography is admirably concentrated and assured.

Persona Paintings

Cristina Bunello.Cross Gallery, 59 Francis St, Dublin. Tues-Fri 10am-5.3opm, Sat 11am-3pm Until July 10 01-4738978

Cristina Bunello’s show Persona at the Cross Gallery consists of just eight paintings, the largest of which measures only 30 by 25 centimetres. That’s pretty small. Many people would be nervous about taking on an entire gallery space which, in the case of the Cross, has four interlinked rooms, with so few and such tiny pieces.

Should Bunello have worried? Not for a minute, and not merely because her show proved to be an instant sell-out, which is unusual in these uncertain times. Go see her work and you’ll find that its quality speaks for itself.

Each painting is a tight, uncluttered view of a child’s head.

They are all girls. The choice of young girls as a subject is fraught with difficulties as witness, for example, recent debates about the premature sexualisation of pre-teens.

Equally, an artist might easily sentimentalise childhood. It seems that Bunello takes chances in both directions, because the girls she depicts are dressed up in various ways, inhabiting, as her show’s title suggests, personas.

The pictures are beautifully painted. They are as rich and detailed as good renaissance portraits (and on occasion they do refer to other paintings) but, while they embody classical values in that sense, they are also comfortably contemporary, and it’s interesting that Bunello points out that, while she works from posed photographs, she is not making portraits. They are not character studies.

She subsequently adds props “such as sunglasses, a hat or an article of clothing . . . as if dressing a mannequin”. What comes across is the child’s growing imaginative understanding of itself and the world, a sense of inhabiting that amazing state of being.

The girls in the paintings regard us, and the world they find themselves in, with questioning curiosity. As for themselves, they play roles, but really they remain strangely other and opaque to us. They’re lost in their own thoughts.

In this they recall the paintings in Bunello’s NCAD degree show, just last year, which had the same remarkable quality of bringing out something magical and uncanny in the familiar.